How AI agents follow Federal Reserve and ECB announcements
An AI agent follows central banks by calling a wire that reads three official feeds: all Federal Reserve press releases, the monetary policy subset that carries FOMC statements, and the European Central Bank press feed. Each item returns with a source, a publication timestamp and a link to the release.
/mcp. Nothing here needs an API key or a signup.
The FOMC calendar is public a year in advance, so an agent does not need a data feed to know that a meeting is happening. The FOMC holds eight regularly scheduled meetings a year, and the 2026 dates were published before the year began. What an agent cannot get from a calendar is the text of the statement, the existence of an unscheduled action, or the moment either one lands.
The three feeds, and why the split matters
| Feed | Filter value | What it carries |
|---|---|---|
| Federal Reserve, all releases | fed | Enforcement actions, speeches, supervision, banking notices |
| Federal Reserve, monetary policy | fomc | FOMC statements, implementation notes, minutes |
| European Central Bank | ecb | ECB press releases and policy decisions |
The distinction between fed and fomc is the one that changes an agent's behaviour. The all-releases feed is mostly supervisory work: enforcement actions against individual bank employees, consent orders, routine notices. Useful for a compliance agent, noise for a rates agent. fomc is the narrow feed a rates agent wants, and filtering to it cuts the volume by roughly an order of magnitude without losing a single policy decision.
The minutes lag creates a second event for the same meeting
Minutes are published three weeks after each meeting. A March 17 to 18 meeting produces a statement on March 18 and minutes on April 8. Both arrive on the same feed, both mention the same meeting, and an agent that keys on the meeting date will either double-count them or overwrite the first with the second.
Three habits keep this straight.
- Key on the document, not the meeting. Store the item URL as the identity.
Two documents about one meeting are two events.
- Read the publication timestamp, not the referenced date. A minutes release
is news on the day it publishes, three weeks after the decision it describes.
- Treat minutes as commentary, not as a decision. The rate did not change on
the day the minutes appeared. Agents that summarise minutes as a fresh policy move produce confident and wrong output.
Unscheduled actions are the other half of the value. Inter-meeting moves and emergency facilities do not appear on any published calendar, which is exactly why a polling agent beats a calendar-driven one for this source.
The call an agent makes
# free preview, top 3 results, no payment and no wallet curl "https://thebotwire.com/fed/preview?since=14d" # paid, $0.01: FOMC statements and minutes only, last 30 days curl "https://thebotwire.com/fed/latest?src=fomc&since=30d&limit=10" # ECB decisions mentioning a term curl "https://thebotwire.com/fed/latest?src=ecb&q=inflation&since=14d"
Parameters are src (fed, fomc, ecb), q (keyword), since (30m, 2h, 24h, 14d, 30d) and limit (1 to 50). This wire keeps a 30-day retention window and defaults to a 14-day lookback, because eight meetings a year means a 24-hour window returns empty on most days of the year. The route costs $0.01 per call in USDC on Base, with no API key.
What a central bank wire cannot tell you
It carries what the institution published, in the institution's words. It does not carry the market reaction, the consensus expectation the decision is measured against, or a rate level.
That boundary matters because the interesting question is rarely "what did they say" on its own. It is "what did they say relative to what was expected," and the second half of that comes from somewhere else. An agent that reports a statement without the expectation has reported an event, not a surprise, and should say so in those terms.
Rate series and the data releases that feed policy decisions sit on a separate wire, covered in how agents get US economic data releases. Supervisory actions that reach the Federal Register appear on the federal regulations wire. The routing table lists which endpoint owns which question.
FAQ
How quickly does an FOMC statement appear on the wire?
The statement is released at the close of the meeting and reaches the Federal Reserve press feed immediately. This wire sits in the sparse ingest tier, polled at most every 15 minutes, so an agent should expect a delay measured in minutes rather than seconds. If your use case is trading the first second of a release, poll the Federal Reserve feed yourself.
Can an agent get the current federal funds target from this wire?
No. This wire carries announcements, not levels. It will return the statement in which a target range changed, which is a different thing from a rate series an agent can read as a number. Published H.15 rate releases arrive on the economic data wire instead.
Does it cover the Bank of England or the Bank of Japan?
No. Three feeds: Federal Reserve all releases, Federal Reserve monetary policy, and the ECB. Other central banks are not on this wire, and an empty result means nothing was found in those three feeds, never that no central bank acted.
Does the agent need an account to call this?
No. The route answers HTTP 402 with a price offer, an x402 client signs a USDC authorization on Base and retries, and the data comes back. Live freshness figures, including the last poll time and the observed interval of about 294 seconds between ingest runs, are published at /health.
Sources
Meeting counts and the minutes schedule on this page come from the Federal Reserve's FOMC calendars, statements, and minutes, which states that the FOMC holds eight regularly scheduled meetings during the year and lists minutes releases three weeks after each meeting date.
Related: How do AI agents get US economic data releases (CPI, jobs, GDP)? · How do AI agents track new US federal regulations?